writing about handing power back to educators and families – and other thoughts

Existential Threat Resource Allocation: Are We Doing it Right?

In the last ten years, there has been an uptick in attention paid to existential threats (threats that could wipe out humanity). This is potentially great news.

Last night, I watched an episode of Elementary, which is one of my favorite television shows. The episode’s plot revolved around existential threats, with a focus on artificial intelligence.

That was enough to get me to write this post.

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A couple years ago, I read Nick Bostrom’s Global Catastrophic Risks which catalogues the various threats that might lead to human extinction.

Since then, I’ve maintained a passing interest in the field. I even went to the Singularity Summit.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around the internet trying to get more caught up on the field.

The good news: there seems to be a lot of talented people working on these issues.

The bad news: I’ve found very little publicly availability data analysis on the issue. I was curious which risks were most likely to occur; which risks were most solvable by human intervention; and the amount of resources that were currently being devoted to each risk.

I found very little of this information. Of course, perhaps this information exists in secret government departments; or perhaps the research exists and I just did a poor job of finding it.